Dear Alanna,
I too am starting up a very small nonprofit, and I admit that I am not comfortable with all of the issues you raised in your blog on November 8th.
Can you share some of your experiences in which inexperienced nonprofits did more harm than good?
DR
Dear DR,
Here are four ways that a small (or large) NGO can unintentionally do harm to the community it’s trying to serve.
1) You can waste the time and effort of a community by initiating projects which have little chance of success. It’s hard to identify a good project for a small community. Community buy-in is no guarantee of success; possessing deep local knowledge doesn’t make a person omniscient. Projects that have little chance of success include vocational training in sewing and handicrafts, beekeeping, and raising chickens. If you waste a year of the community’s time on a broiler chicken project that never makes a profit, that’s a year of time and effort which could have gone to real income generation or looking after children.
2) You can leave communities convinced that they need outsiders to solve their problems. If you raise $3000 for a backhoe to clear irrigation ditches, then what happens next time the ditches silt up? The farmers’ cooperative will never realize they could have cleared it with hand shovels, or raised the money by charging a membership fee.
3) You can damage beneficial community structures, or solidify harmful structures. Your choice of community intermediary elevates that person or group, by putting them in control (real or perceived control) of valuable assets. If you work with existing power structures, you can support and entrench inequalities, such as sexism or racism, which are already present. If you chose partners who are not part of the current elite, you can destabilize delicate community balances, and erode resilience.
4) You can construct a building and then not provide funds for maintenance or staffing. A school needs a teacher. A clinic needs a doctor or nurse. All buildings need upkeep – painting and repairs at the very least. A building with not funds for maintenance is a drain on community resources in perpetuity, or an eyesore.
I recommend reading Michael Maren’s book The Road to Hell; it has its flaws but it is very sincere and brings up a lot to think about.
Best,
Alanna
Readers – if anyone has case studies or examples, please comment.
Edited to add – 1) Check out the fascinating examples in the comments and 2) Owen has two more ways an incompetent NGO can hurt the population it is trying to help.
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(Photo Credit: Copyright Glenna Gordon)
She gave it to me as an example of aid with unintended consequences.
could you elaborate on those examples? i’ve seen vocational schools that seem successful, or are you speaking about sewing in particular? what about egg farms, i’ve heard positive things?
My 2¢:
Everyone gets some ideas wrong sometimes, it is unavoidable (re: point #1). What I think matters more is that even the best NGOs can find it hard to get feedback and solid knowledge on what is working and what isn’t.
If something isn’t working, it obviously has to stop or be changed, but actually knowing what is going on can be hard. How long can something fail before it should be changed? Do you really know what was happening before your project started? Because of the nature of the work, you won’t get market signals if you are bombing (the NGO won’t go bankrupt if beekeeping doesn’t pan out), so you need to actively seek feedback.
If a small-scale project fails and is caught early on, that is life, try again. If the same project fails slowly and consumes valuable resources, the NGO messed up.
Great post! Just wanted to share 3 examples in just a few miles from our own project in East Africa that illustrate a few of the potential issues you point out:
#1. A foreign nonprofit led by a man on a mission to build an orphanage did “the right thing” and, after extensive interviews with many candidates, partnered with a local woman who had demonstrated her ability to successfully create change in her own community by successfully building a well-run primary school. She’d created her own NGO, complete with a Board that was entirely comprised of respected local leaders. To demonstrate stewardship of funds donated to the foreign nonprofit, its founder believed it was critical to leverage his own expertise to make key decisions regarding construction, and ignored the local leader’s advice and input. In particular, listening to the advice of expats he trusted, he decided to build in a location populated by a number of expats that would be quite far from the school run by the local organization. This made it impossible for orphans currently attending that school to use the facility as the local NGO had planned, and also made it impossible for children at the future orphanage to attend the well-run school that the local organization had already built independently. In addition, the foreign nonprofit leader felt it was important to oversee the work of the local NGO, and asked to add an ex-pat from his own country to the board of the local group. Because the foreign nonprofit was investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the site, the local leader felt compelled to participate for over a year. Eventually, though, the local NGO walked away from the partnership, despite the loss of investment it meant to the organization because the founder and Board felt so strongly that decisions the foreigner was making were not appropriate for their community, and not in alignment with their vision. Many local organizations and individuals would not have made the decision to walk away in the face of such potential funding, and this situation may have easily ended up in an alternate scenario with the local nonprofit supporting an effort that it did not believe was beneficial to the community just to secure the investment of a wealthy foreign organization. As it stands, I believe the foreign nonprofit is proceeding independently.
#2. An wealthy American teenager formed a nonprofit and raised tens of thousands of dollars to rebuild a local preschool at which she’d previously worked as a voluntourist. She personally oversaw construction and chose the contractor from another village (a friend she’d met during a previous trip), and decided to rebuild the school on a plot of land owned by a local church, where the original school had been built. When the US teenager returned to the country to see what she’d accomplished, she learned the community had no plans to maintain the school effectively, and the teacher (who was teaching about 50 young children of all ages in a single classroom) was untrained and was not being paid. They’d assumed these expenses would be covered by their American benefactors. The teenager and her mother sought another local leader, a woman who was successfully running another school, to take over and run the school in a sustainable way, and improve the education the children were receiving. While the woman they asked wanted to help and offered to serve as an example, she refused to get directly involved, especially in light of the powerful social position held by the male pastor at the church where the school had been built. When I last heard, the project was looking to create a salon where the mothers of the children at the school could work to earn money to pay for porridge, school supplies and the teacher’s salary to fund the school long term. Our local contacts scoffed at this idea, because local salons in the area are plentiful and earn so little money. Alternatively, it was possible that the American nonprofit would continue to fund the school indefinitely.
#3. There’s a building not far away that I noticed never seemed to have children present – though it looked like a school. When I asked about it, I was told that a foreigner had built it, but hadn’t consulted the local community to learn that what they needed was a secondary school, rather than a primary facility. I’m sure the situation is vastly more complex, but nonetheless it seems to sit vacant.
Of course, all of these stories are tainted by my own lenses and perspective, but each has at least some lesson to teach other wannabe dogooders like me. All that said, I think there’s room for new ideas at the development table, but believe those undertaking new initiatives should seek be very thoughtful in their approaches and very wary of many potential unintended consequences of “doing good.”
One more thing: these problems plague large, experienced nonprofits too. It’s not just the newbies.
@furbol10 – Vocational programming is very hard to do well. Not impossible, just hard. Same with egg farms. It’s simply difficult to do them well. They seem like an easy fix and they aren’t. I have seem vocational training work – and by work I mean get jobs for graduates after training – but not often. I am not sure I’ve ever seen a successful egg farm.
Great post, Alanna, including your original one. I’ll add, inexperienced NGOs can do harm by:
– Unintentionally seeding confusion among donors, volunteers, community — dampening time available for the real work
– Failing to see opportunities to collaborate with existing folks — angering potential mentors/supporters
– Failing to do the “overhead” stuff (“95% of our funds go to services!”), like strategic plans, written service agreements, personnel policies, impact research, etc. — so even if what they do is great, future funders won’t believe it and can’t replicate it.
All that said, love the energy, creativity, and (often) talent of newbie philanthropists and social entrepreneurs. And, sometimes, small, focused organizations serve the job better than large ones. Just encourage the newbies to educate themselves fully and find some experienced hands to mentor. And let’s have experienced folks be willing to engage, mentor, collaborate.
If you want an example of how difficult vocational training is to do well, just look at the Canadian province of Newfoundland. When the fisheries industry collapsed there in the late eighties, huge job-training schemes were put into play. Many people were trained to cut hair and do dressmaking/tailoring. Oddly enough, the living made was just as difficult as Mark Twain’s small town where people “made a precarious living taking in one another’s laundry.”
If it’s that hard for a government in one of the most-developed countries in the world to figure out how to do this in its own culture and regulatory environment, who do we think we are to do it in places like Africa? Especially if all we have are good intentions.
hi guys, interesting comments! i am wondering though, if these are examples of initiatives that you are wary of, are there any you feel very positively about? or are they all so culture dependent that there are no “oldies but goodies”?
@ellie If you chack out my “things I believe in” tag – http://alannashaikh.blogspot.com/search/label/things%20I%20believe%20in – you can find some of the interventions I like. Of course, everything depends on good implementation, but some things are easier to do well.
@anonymous Wow, powerful examples. #2 especially gets to me since it’s so clear the teenager meant well.
@pam These are great points. Thanks for bringing them into the conversation.
I think it is also extremely important to understand the culture of the people. As a native of Uzbekistan, a lot of the times NGOs that I’ve volunteered for had ideas that are just too difficult to grasp culturally in that context. Therefore, real understanding of cultures of the region is crucial for NGO success.
@Anya – that is a great point. Culturally insensitive projects go nowhere. Can you give us an example of this happening in Uzbekistan?
Sure…Some of the NGO projects I have seen in my home country: for example, a project that had to do with women’s issues. The scope included more opportunities and independence for women. In theory, it is a great concept, especially in the context of the capital, which is far more “Westernized.” However, other smaller towns and villages are far away from that mindset, and the pre-defined (and ACCEPTED by both females and males!) path for women is to be in charge of the household, children, etc. While it is a great NGO initiative in theory, in practice, the cultural norms are just non-existent in many places for the idea to move forward.
@anya Thanks for the examples. You’ve also pointed the way to another topic I think about a lot – how exactly should development projects interact with cultural mores they believe to be negative?
Whoa…nice healthy discussion!
I was intrigued by the comment left by Pam Fox Rollin who said
“Just encourage the newbies to educate themselves fully and find some experienced hands to mentor. And let’s have experienced folks be willing to engage, mentor, collaborate.”
I have two points/questions:
1) How do we facilitate this mentorship?
2) I am working on a small library project in Nicaragua (If the government doesn’t fall apart) and none of the issues raised so far are huge red flags for me. If anyone wanted to review the details of my project and point out potential mistakes, I would be hugely greatfull.
You can read about our project at
http://www.appropedia.org/BRIDGE/library
David – since you are in school, I think your obvious mentors are at with you. A university is a huge source of expertise that you’re supposed to be accessing? Are there professors with appropriate background you can reach out to for advice?
For those not in school, Aid Workers Network (http://aidworker.net) can be a useful source of advice and mentorship.
Turning your question back at you? What kind of mentorship relation are you seeking?
@A – I spend all of my time in a somewhat conservative engineering department and have had almost no support from my faculty. I am sure that there are supportive faculty in other departments, but it is hard to access them.
As for what kind of mentorship I would like, I would like help and advice. Probably the easiest way for someone to do this would be to join our mailing list. By monitoring our communication, you could pitch in your advice and comments whenever an interesting topic or problem came up.
We (www.the1010project.org) partner with civil society groups that have income generating ideas. We partner with existing structures and established entities. We are a “newbie” in the sense that we were founded in 2003.
As you pointed out, income generation and businesses fail. We are not proclaiming that income generation is a panacea. But even when a venture or enterprise fails, it still provides lessons to be learned and perseverance.
However, we do have examples of vocational training (tailoring) and broiler chicken projects working. They are profitable; and the profits are then reinvested into the CSO (or CBO) and ultimately the community.
How is this a waste? What are your suggestions/solutions for people working together?
Here is a post I wrote some time ago about an NGO selling water filters at below the market value thereby killing off the market driven solutions for clean water. Sometimes we aim to help in the short term but cause a lot more harm in the long term. Thanks for sharing these thoughts! http://bit.ly/2xKpOh
Sorry for the late comment (two years after posting): I’ve just seen this post linked to from somewhere else.
Similar to Daniela’s point, but on a larger scale: when I was in Haiti, people told me that the domestic textile and tailoring industries there were wiped out when the US sent tonnes of used clothing as relief after a hurricane in the sixties. (These second-hand clothes were known as for some years as “Kennedys”.) Why would anyone pay for clothes when they were available free? But when the aid stopped the domestic industry had disappeared, so Haiti had to continue to import used clothes from the US – though of course people had to pay for them then.
So aid can destroy local markets and jobs.
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